Counting Crime: J. Edgar Hoover, the Wickersham Commission, and the Problem of Criminal Statistics

see also 
Grove Patterson, An 
Address, 
in
P
ROCEEDINGS OF THE 
A
TTORNEY 
G
ENERAL
’
S 
C
ONFERENCE ON 
C
RIME 
84 
(1934) (providing a later example of the concern over the European question). 

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himself had no practical police experience. He was a lawyer who had 
risen through the white-collar ranks at the Justice Department, but he 
never served in a local police force.) 
Hoover began his campaign by mobilizing the networks he had built 
among police organizations and police officials at the local level—most 
notably, through the International Association of Chiefs of Police. At 
Hoover’s urging, police officials from across the country wrote in to the 
commission to declare their faith in the Bureau. At the same time, they 
had a stick to go with their carrot. As part of their support for Hoover, 
police chiefs made it clear that they would refuse to send their local 
statistics to anyone else at the federal level.
5
In effect, Hoover 
mobilized police networks to support the Bureau as a central public 
repository for crime statistics, but also to make it very difficult for 
anyone else to do this job effectively. He deployed this strategy 
throughout his career, mobilizing civic organizations and law 
enforcement organizations to support the Bureau at key moments. 
Hoover’s second tactic in the statistics campaign takes us back to the 
discussion of staff power from last night. Once the Wickersham 
Commission got underway, Hoover made sure to become very friendly 
with its staff members. As part of my book research, I filed a Freedom 
of Information Act request with the FBI to receive its documents on the 
Wickersham Commission. The file contains a wealth of ingratiating 
letters from Hoover to various staff members advertising all of the 
wonderful things that the Bureau was doing to fight crime. In an odd 
twist, these letters were being sent to a Commission staffer named Max 
Lowenthal. If you know anything about FBI history, you know that a 
few decades later Max Lowenthal would write a searing takedown of the 
FBI as the country’s ruthless ideological police.
6
Hoover ended up 
hating Lowenthal—no surprise there. But in this earlier moment they 
were allies, with a shared goal of amassing scientific information to 
determine what was happening in the sphere of crime.
7
5. R
EPORT ON 
C
RIMINAL 
S
TATISTICS
, 
supra 
note 4, at 16; Memorandum from E.K. 
Thode for the Director of the Fed. Bureau of Investigation (April 18, 1930) (on file with 
author (section 3, FBI FOIA 62-21747-96 (Wickersham))). 
6.
See 
M
AX 
L
OWENTHAL
,
T
HE 
F
EDERAL 
B
UREAU OF 
I
NVESTIGATION
444 (1950). 
7. For early exchanges between Hoover and Lowenthal, see Memorandum from J. 
Edgar Hoover, Dir., Fed. Bureau of Investigation, on the Conference with Mr. Max 
Lowenthal (August 8, 1929) (on file with author (section 1, FBI FOIA 62-21747-17 
(Wickersham))); Letter from J. Edgar Hoover, Dir., Fed. Bureau of Investigation, to Max 
Lowenthal, Wickersham Comm’n Staff (August 10, 1929) (on file with author(1929, section 1, 
FBI FOIA 62-21747-17 (Wickersham))). 

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